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Chapter 7: Life Is a Constant Drama

Rikta means emptiness, deva means divine - divine emptiness. That is how you, by and by, have to imbibe the spirit of emptiness in you. Inside there is just emptiness, mm? That is how I feel your seed is. The more empty you feel, the more empty you can become. And you can feel it easily, it will not be difficult; it will just come naturally.

Emptiness has never been part of western religion, but in the East, emptiness has been the deepest-going meditation. In the West, emptiness is felt to be somehow negative, as if an empty mind is the devil’s workshop. It is not. In fact, an empty mind is the workshop of existence. If the mind is empty the devil cannot enter. The devil can enter only through thinking, through some occupation. If the mind is empty, then only can existence enter.

Rikta means emptiness. So try this: walking, just feel emptiness walking; when you are talking, just feel emptiness talking; loving, just feel emptiness loving. Continuously remember that inside there is nothing. And that is the nature of man, that nothingness. It is not an absence, it is a presence, it is fullness. When the emptiness is total, it is fullness.

So try it, and I will start working on you from this moment.

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This morning, at the morning discourse, I did not quite understand your saying that the fulfilled, enlightened spirit going back home doesn’t have to come back to earth for another life. This may be my western-trained mind, but what is happening to this fulfilled enlightenment, this attaining, this evaporation? How do you explain having come if you will not be again?

You come only if something is still missing, something is still imperfect. So the last life is the life of enlightenment.

I have come because something was still missing. But now it is not missing and I will not be coming again.

That doesn’t mean that you become non-existential, no. That simply means that you become so absolutely existential that the body cannot contain you. The body becomes small and you become so big for the body that you cannot be contained in it. You become so infinite that the finite mind cannot contain you. But one has to come again and again, even if something is missing, to learn it.

The world is a school, it is a learning, a discipline, a training. Once you have learned, you are not sent back, because there is no need, no point.

So an enlightened person can help people only in his last life. Then after that the help is impossible, then he evaporates. So only for a few years the possibility remains open and available. If you are not enlightened, you cannot help people. If you are enlightened, you can help only for a few years, because this is going to be your last(.